Mr. Chair, I'd say first of all, Canada is a very lucky country because North America is almost like an island, in the sense that we have great neighbours to the south and there's no conventional military threat to Canada from any external player. In that regard, we are quite fortunate. That's why we have contingency forces that are ready for our sovereignty missions at home, which I just described earlier, whether these be the immediate response units, the ready-duty ships, the aircraft on alert in Bagotville and Cold Lake and, as mentioned, search and rescue, all of which are ready to go anywhere because, internationally, we never know what the future will bring.
It's been my experience—and I've been wearing this uniform for 37 years—that we've never been able to predict where the next conflict will be. None of us thought we'd be in Afghanistan or in Libya. I'm going to be welcoming the fighter pilots back to Bagotville tomorrow afternoon, when they're coming home. When I was visiting those guys in Trapani I was fascinated, because they had just finished visiting the Commonwealth cemetery. This was the
425 Squadron from Bagotville, the Alouettes.
The Alouettes de Bagotville were launching from bases in Tunisia, lining up on Mount Etna to drop bombs in Sicily 67 years before. Yet there they were, launching from Sicily today to drop bombs on North Africa and lining up on Mount Etna to come home. You can never predict the future. So indeed our mission is to make sure that we have those sailors, soldiers, airmen and women who are ready to go out the door, and how we do that is by ensuring that those units that have been identified for high readiness have all of the equipment in the best possible condition. They have the equipment first of all, and that equipment is well maintained with all the spare parts and all the ammunition—but they also have all the personnel with the right skill sets.
Not only that, when they deploy, they have replacements back home because stuff happens. Everyone has unique family circumstances and issues, so we need to have some depth. But then that team has gone through a very deliberate training and validation cycle so that the commander of the army, the navy, and the air force can tell me that the unit is good to go.
So the metrics that are being provided with regard to the maintenance of those assets.... And, indeed, each one of those assets is different whether it's a Cormorant helicopter doing search and rescue; or HMCS Charlottetown ; or as we have today, where the essence of the training mission in Kabul is third battalion PPCLI. That they are good to go out the door to achieve their missions is due to all of the equipment. And it's the personnel and their training, but also the validation that they're ready to go. We track all those units in normal readiness, and a normal readiness unit like the second battalion of the PPCLI slung sandbags on the Assiniboine River in Portage la Prairie. They were ready to go out the door with no notice, and the way they can do it is also in being able to send
the 3rd Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment, in Haiti. It's the same situation there, we save lives.
So it's all about the metrics in terms of equipment availability, equipment maintenance, personnel availability, all the training, and then a certification and validation of the training they've completed.
I know some of you visited Wainwright recently and were able to see some of the training that was happening out there. Part of that was the validation of training for that entire brigade out of Petawawa.